The hell of it is, I see the name and think of Michael P Carroll, who is a very conservative NJ politician. Turtle Fan 07:27, November 4, 2009 (UTC)
- That might have been HT's intent. I'm coming to believe that HT does pour over various lists to create names for characters. There are quite a few Eastern European characters who share names with real Eastern European soccer players, for example. TR 17:17, November 4, 2009 (UTC)
- Hmm, that would be interesting. I wish he still did chat sessions so we could suss out his motivations on these things. Of course, we'd probably just bitch about how much HW sucks. Turtle Fan 17:52, November 4, 2009 (UTC)
- I'm sure they'd filter out the "wow HW sucks" stuff. More artful stuff like "so, is HW going to get better?" might be allowed though. TR 18:03, November 4, 2009 (UTC)
- It would be fun to try to sneak something like that through. Turtle Fan 19:00, November 4, 2009 (UTC)
Bumped but why not since this has come up several times. I remember reading an interview with a SF writer (Jerry Pournelle I think) who said he had a hard time coming up with names for secondary characters since they had to be plausible but didn't want to accidentally provide significant, foreshadowing names where they weren't wanted. His solution was to look at a bookcase and take the first name of one author and the last name of a second. Given the loads and loads of characters Turtledove has, I wouldn't be surprised if he goes through lists of names of the appropriate nationality to come up with names. ML4E (talk) 18:48, August 3, 2013 (UTC)
- See also Jaroslav Stribny, Konrad Henlein's assassin or a Czecho soccer player of some talent, depending on the context. TR (talk) 18:51, August 3, 2013 (UTC)
- There's also Shota Rustaveli. I can't help wondering if that fact that Yuri Voroshilov, not Rustaveli, was the poet of the bunch, is supposed to be some sort of subversion of expectations.
- For that matter, Lucien Galtier is the name of the founding father of St Paul, MN. Turtle Fan (talk) 03:08, August 4, 2013 (UTC)
Template:ExplosiveDeviceDeathFictional[]
... is not working at the moment. I have no notion of how to fiddle with the coding. ML4E (talk) 00:42, November 7, 2017 (UTC)